Okay, who is doctor Attmann and who at Valve is in love with him or her? Using Google, I found various people with a last name of Attmann and a doctor's degree, most of them at German universities. I think this is a clue that Portal 2 will be playing at a German university.

Copy/Paste doesn't copy the underlines, so I'll just bold the underlined t's.

Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike and Half-Life) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced Portal 2 for shipment this coming holiday season.
Portal 2 is the sequel to 2007's Portal, which won 70 industry achievement awards.

I am so wanting there to be more sections for "androids". I always thought the idea of "android hell is a real place" was such a mind screw and gave you so much understanding of how messed up this company was, that it needed a whole game through the eyes of the androids.

We were logging into the wiki as backup/backup. There was a progress bar displayed on login, that increased slowly over a couple of days (in addition to spitting out images).

Once the progress bar filled up, the Portal 2 announcement on Steam went live, complete with underlined images. At that time, backup/backup started spitting out a BASIC program, and logging in with drattmann/h0nee spit out some data files. If you plugged the data files into the BASIC program, you got these images, which seem to imply that at least this phase of the ARG is over: http://portalwiki.net/index.php/Aperture_Image_Format [portalwiki.net]

The "Adjust radio frequency" update added a bunch of radios all over the place which, if dragged to the correct location (or if you extract the resource bundles), will produce some sounds which translate to an old ham-radio-style slow-scan TV signal which have a bunch of pictures which give you some sort of hashed version of the phone number of the BBS where you login with 'backup/backup' and watch a progress bar saying "backup restoring, ETA: next Thursday (except on weekends)" or other silly stuff, and get ASCII art pictures of scenes which involve robots.

I'm sure I'm missing something. Like the secret new game ending. Which is on Youtube somewhere.

Yes, Portal works under Linux (using wine). Barely. Just running the Steam front-end with wine is pitiful, slow, full of drawing issues, and likely to halt or crash unexpectedly. It was not an enjoyable experience for me and I had none of these issues when I was playing WoW.

Portal is the only thing that my four-year-old Windows XP notebook gets used for. I would hope that Steam gets seriously revised and becomes more wine-friendly when Portal2 is released.

At this point, I'm far more interested in Vavle's Mac [macrumors.com] development that they seem to be doing. I'd love to know if I can finally ditch my Windows partition. I'd love to see Steam and the Source Engine on OS X.

Given their solid Direct3D stance, I'm a little worried... but a gamer can dream, right?

If Valve were to spend the money to develop for OSX, they'd never recoup it in profits because there's not a big enough installed base.

It's a lot more likely that Valve will make Portal or HL3 available on XBox than on Macs.

Not at all, in fact, if they make a cross platform rendering engine then they can sell that to other interested developers (who are interested in the continually growing userbase of the Mac) and make a profit from that as well.

If Valve were to port the Orange Box or Portal 2 to Mac, they would have the installed base of practically every Mac sold since (let's see... ) October 2008 capable of playing the game, with the Geforce 9400M being poor by modern standards but good enough for Source. That's a lot of computers that are otherwise starved for decent games. I can think of worse business decisions.

Didn't they already do a fair portion of the work with the PS3 port? It *had* to be OpenGL, necessitating redoing the engine (or just updating their old OpenGL renderer). However, I heard it was not very good on the PS3. Given the time that passed, I'd bet they used the PS3 engine as a jump-off point and have been optimizing heavily, around OpenGL 2.1 and 3.0 I'd bet. No coincidence 10.6.3 is supposed to have OpenGL 3.0 support.

If Valve were to spend the money to develop for OSX, they'd never recoup it in profits because there's not a big enough installed base.

That depends on how difficult the code is to port to MacOS/X. If Valve is using a cross-platform game engine anyway, then porting to MacOS/X might be just a matter of recompiling the code and testing/tweaking it a bit. I know I'd be very likely to by Portal 2 if it came out for Mac, and I'm very unlikely to buy it if it doesn't (since I have nothing else I could run it on,

If Valve were to spend the money to develop for OSX, they'd never recoup it in profits because there's not a big enough installed base.

Did it ever occur to you, as you wrote this, to wonder how what you wrote could be true while there are plenty of successful Mac OS X games? Do you think Blizzard and ID (for example) run their Mac divisions at a loss?

They don't even have to develop the whole game, as the game itself already exists. All they have to do is port the engine over (or even just wrap it in Cider, although that would not be ideal). Porting an engine over takes a bit of effort, to be sure, but far less effort than it took to create

At this point, I'm far more interested in Vavle's Mac development that they seem to be doing. I'd love to know if I can finally ditch my Windows partition. I'd love to see Steam and the Source Engine on OS X.

Given their solid Direct3D stance, I'm a little worried... but a gamer can dream, right?

Still, Portal 2. Going to have to play that.

And yet, Crossover (which has an announcement a few articles down) has worked with Steam and Source Engine quite well. Half-Life, Half-Life 2 worked fine way back when I tried it (and bought it) on OS X. It was before OS X 10.5 when I tried it and it worked. I'd be shocked if it wasn't working anymore. Portal wasn't around when I tried it, but I'd guess it works.

I haven't tried portal in crossover & wine since it first came out, but even though hl2 worked fine, portal had issues when actually looking through your portal sometimes, depending on the surface it was on. I checked a couple of times, and the bug was long standing, maybe it's finally fixed.

That would be great actually. There's just so many possibilities with the portals if you played together with other people. It's also technically possible as the portal gun can be used in Garry's Mod and other games too. I sure wish it will have multiplayer.

There were some cliffhangers though, like the reference to that ship and other stuff. Also;

After she has destroyed the final piece, a portal malfunction tears the room apart and transports everything to the surface. Chell is then seen lying outside the facility's gates amid the remains of GLaDOS. In the PC version, Chell is then dragged away from the facility by an unseen figure speaking in a robotic voice, thanking her for assuming the "party escort submission position" (a reference to GLaDOS requesting that she assume this position after escaping).[25] This retcon was added to the PC version in an update on March 3, 2010.

I always wondered if they were going to try and tie Portal to Half Life. After all in Episode 2 Aperture Labs was mentioned and GLaDOS tells Chell that the world has changed since she last saw it. Maybe they are doing something very interesting story wise.

I always wondered if they were going to try and tie Portal to Half Life. After all in Episode 2 Aperture Labs was mentioned and GLaDOS tells Chell that the world has changed since she last saw it. Maybe they are doing something very interesting story wise.

Portal is already tied to Half Life.
Aperture Labs is Black Mesas competitor.
The story takes place paralell to Half Life 1.

2. The ending to HL2 episode 2 wasn't much of a cliffhanger if you ask me.

3. Half life1: 1998. Half life 2: 2004 (6 years later) Episode 1: 2006 (2 years later) Episode 2: 2007 (1 year later). It's now 2010, 3 years later. We've got another 3 years before we can really say "This is an unusually long for Valve." Granted, I wouldn't expect them to reinvent the wheel like they did from HL1 to HL2. So I don't think you're being patient. Neither am I though, I want them to hurry the hell up.

While you're waiting for Portal 2, play the FV mappack [wecreatestuff.com] if you haven't already. It introduces some new game mechanics, and would itself have been an OK sequel (or prequel), except it's a totally free mod instead.

Prelude is nowhere near as fun/polished as TFV. There are bits of dialog that make me wonder if the creators were paying attention AT ALL when they played Portal themselves (so many things in Prelude don't make sense). I'm trying very hard not to come out and say that Prelude was intelligence-insultingly dumb, but there it is.

However, it was quite challenging, and if THAT is what you're looking for, Prelude has it in abundance.

But of the two, I highly HIGHLY recommend TFV, and I will outright DISrecommend

I'm sure I'll probably get modded troll, but I really never got this game. I thought it was fun to port around the first couple of times but I honestly found it to get repetitive and boring to keep doing the same thing over and over. I breezed through the game fairly quickly and never felt like there was anything particularly innovative or amazing about the game--I spent my youth playing many hours of Nintendo games that had the same thing, except only in two dimensions. It felt more like a polished half

Bingo. The gameplay wasn't anything amazing, it was just a clever take on the usual puzzle mechanics, but the context, the plot thread that ran throughout and the dark humour that went with it made it a great game.

I disagree. I thought the plot was terrible (escaping from a facility simply isn't all that interesting), and while there was a lot of great dark humor, it really was the gameplay that made Portal great. If it was the same game with different mechanics, it would have sucked.

Actually that's a good question because the first day Portal came out there was a bug where the voice giving you instructions wasn't audible (for a few people). That happened to me, I played the first few levels and I never heard the voice, then the next day Valve patched the game and the game worked for me.

It was a subtle bug because all the other sounds were there, I never realized the best part of the game is missing. Luckily I hadn't gotten too far into the game.

I don't know what I'm more surprised at, the clever way in which Valve announced Portal 2, or how quickly their obscure puzzle was crowd sourced and solved. Heck, I only noticed the achievement a view days ago, and now we have unencrypted images from sound bytes in the game. I wonder what would happen if Valve left a little teaser challenge: cure cancer and we'll give you episode 3.

Think of it as a login/pass combination. drattmann/h0nee for what appears to be "Dr. Ratt Mann". The character name given to whoever drew all the markings on the walls ("the cake is a lie", the ode to the companion cube, directions for escape, etc) was "Rat Man", who was thought to be either another test subject, or an Aperture Science employee who went mad.

I think the problem is that, unless you look to sources outside the original Portal, you never encounter that character's name. You logically know someone left all those scribbles for you, but you never really know who. (It might be that if you play through the game with the developer commentary, they might discuss that character; I tried, but since I had just played through the game, even though it's fairly short, I found it too boring to play through a second time trying to pay attention to the commentary

Yes, that is a problem, but I also feel it's part of what makes Portal so great. Sure, there's interesting puzzles, dark humor, and top notch design. But it's all the additional stuff you can find OUTSIDE of the main game if you take the time to look that makes it so appealing. I love how you can play the game and enjoy it on its own, but if you wish, there's also a whole other dimension to it that makes the story straddle the line betwen FPS and ARG.

If you listen to the developer comment on Portal you will find out why Portal is more important to Valve than Half Like is at this point. Portal is probably the most popular "FPS" genre game for Women ever released. IIRC the lead developer at Valve was even a woman. Gabe makes the comment in the developer commentary with Portal that it opened their eyes to the potential to selling games to that other 50% of the population. Portal was a huge hit with the girls and from a business perspective Portal then became more important than Half Life.

I love playing FPSes. Portal is a really cool game but I only played for about 15 minutes. I felt like throwing up afterward. I never bothered finishing the game. I watched the ending on Youtube. Qute. Only which I could have played it.

I understand that Valve tends to adjust the line of sight of the player slightly (like in Half-Life series) and for some people it makes them really dizzy and nauseous. There's a hack to readjust the line of sight. I have tried that as well and no luck.

In fact, while I enjoy Valve's games - I have played up to HL2, all their games, and really only Valve is the problem, make me really nauseous. I have not had any problem or significant problem with any other FPS or any other type of video game - COD, Modern Warfare, Solider Fortune, Delta Force, Operation Flashpoint have ALL been fine.

I had this problem at one point during HL2, where you're taking the hovercraft along the water/waste/whatever. I had to put it down for a week, finish that section, and then it was fine. When I replayed HL2 a year or so later, I felt a bit sick at that same part, but I got through it faster so there was no stop. No idea why that part exactly.

The same could have been said about Half-Life, but they have managed to do more and more quite well. I never could believe that a game is so perfect that you can't add more to it. The main thing missing was 1. needed more levels and 2. needed more background story. My guess is that Portal 2 will be just that, more story and more levels. I don't see them changing the rules or physics of the game, as that wouldn't make sense.

Portal was unique, it was fun, but it wasn't perfect. I hate being on the hook for finding out who anyone is, or what the hell's going on. Mystery's fun, but at the end, give me some god damned answers, and let the characters speak for themselves. The fact that Chell and Gordon are both completely voiceless is disturbing to me.

I disagree. I think that silent protagonists are always ineffective (or, have been in the games I've played), simply because it turns the main character of the game into a very boring character. You simply can't get very attached to a character who says nothing, and could be taken completely out of the story without having an effect on it. I guess you could argue that it's effective in that they're not intended to be good characters, but simply an agent for the player to control, but I don't think the fact

The sad thing is that portal 2 will be a disappointment.It may in fact be a fantastic game but it will be judged next to portal which is pretty much a perfect game.

Its worth remembering that this is valve, which consistently defies expectations. Team fortress classic was a fun little game: valve then took almost everything about that game and threw it out for team fortress 2. Usually that is a recipe for disappointment, but I think almost everyone who played both would agree that TF2 was much better. Half life 1 was also really great, but valve managed to improve on it for HL2. A lot of people were disappointed that they put out left 4 dead 2 so quickly, but I think it was an improvement.

And there are clear ways in which they could improve Portal. Here's one: LONGER. Another way to improve it? Bundle it with HL2 episode 3. I am having a hard time thinking of other ways they could make it better, but there are many reasons why I don't work at Valve.

>>Team fortress classic was a fun little game: valve then took almost everything about that game and threw it out for team fortress 2. Usually that is a recipe for disappointment, but I think almost everyone who played both would agree that TF2 was much better.

Not me. I uninstalled TF2 with only 20 hours or so into it.

I still have the original Team Fortress installed (the one that Classic Team Fortress was based on), which is still superior to both.

And there are clear ways in which they could improve Portal. Here's one: LONGER.

I sympathise that it was over all too quickly, but Portal was the perfect length. It was part of its charm. Making it any longer would just have been dragging it out.

Another way to improve it? Bundle it with HL2 episode 3.

Can't argue with that. I thought the idea of episodic gaming was that the games came out in quick succession? I'm not a fan of the idea, but at least a short wait between releases would have been some consolation.

Wow, I do like that idea. The puzzles in portal 1 were generally only able to be done one way. While I think that was a good way to do it, some puzzles with many different ways of solving it, or much bigger environments, would be a really nice variety. I can't see them doing multiplayer without expanding the levels.

Come to think of it, the mechanic is fun enough even without the full portal game. I'd be interested to see valve do, for example a sandbox game where you have a portal gun, maybe you're a th

Portal was by no means perfect. It had amazing gameplay, but had a very weak story (although GLaDOS was a great character). It was also really short, so it pretty much a rip-off at $20. I loved it in spite of its shortcomings, but it did have glaring flaws.

If they do, I wonder if they will use a 'new, improved' version of the portal gun. What I mean is, in order to keep the puzzles in Portal interesting, the gun had a very serious limitation - it could only create portals on flat surfaces made out of a very specific material (not sure what it was, but it appeared to be some sort of ceramic tile, or something. Maybe it was just concrete, not sure.

Put another way, the Portal levels mostly had an 'over-designed' feel to them, but that was ok and made sense in th

As you noticed, the portal gun really can't work in HL2, the areas are just too open and people would end up outside of the map in no time (or it would have to only work in a handful of specific areas).

It seems more likely to me that Gordan will rescue Chell and she'll make prescripted portals for him while he escorts her past the combine and does all of the gravity gun stuff.

The dialog should be really interesting:
Gordan:...
Chell:...
Gordan:...
Chell:...

Although to be fair, Chell never talks in Portal because there is nobody to talk to.

Even if there is nothing to talk to, humans do talk to themselves sometimes. Notwithstanding the talking electronics. I think if I was put through a course like that, I'd be saying various unflattering things about GLaDOS's nonexistand mother and father, and anyone who programmed her by about level 3.